Weekly Poem 1/27/2012

Go In and Out the Window

Math by Myself--Missing #'s by 5's & 10's

We have a new choice activity in our Math by Myself choice during Daily 5 Math. This choice gives students extra practice both with skip counting by 5's and 10's, as well as writing numbers above 20. Our standard in kindergarten is to be able to write numbers up to 20, but this activity allows for students to stretch beyond the standard. On laminated pieces of paper, the students have a full hundreds chart complete with missing numbers in both the 5's column and on the other side the 10's column. Students go through skip counting and fill in the missing number using a dry erase marker.

Accuracy Mini-Lesson Blend Onset and Rime

For a whole group mini-lesson today, we practiced our new word families by pulling one card out of each pile. Students picked either the yellow piles or the blue piles and picked one card from the onset and one card from the rime. After they picked the card, they put the two cards together and built the word. Once each student read their word, we read the word a second time as a class.

Special Guests for Surfer of the Week!

Today, Ben's mother and father came to our classroom to teach us about the Chinese New Year. They started off by reading us a story about a little boy who lives in China and in the end turns into a dragon that helps form a river in his home town. After reading the story, each child went back to their seats to create their own puppet dragon. The class loved having Ben's parents join our class and were very excited to take the puppets home and use their imagination!

Word Families "-ug" and "-ub"

As I introduced our new word families this week, we brainstormed words that might be found in each of the word families. After filling in the families "house" we put them in a basket in our word work station to use during that choice for Daily 5. At the end of the week, we will see if we can compile an even longer list of words in each word family than we were able to at the beginning of the week.

We also have three words from each family hanging above our tables as our new table names.

Weekly Reader--Brrrr!

Going along with our study of snowy weather and the cold temperatures in winter, we read a Weekly Reader all about snow! Inside the magazine it talked about animals who hibernate and migrate in the winter seasons. We were excited to learn two new vocabulary words and put them on our word collector! I had a few extra smaller versions of the magazine that we put in the "winter" basket on our book shelf to be available for students to pick when shopping for new books for their book boxes.

Snow Painting

On Friday, we finished our week off by painting snowflakes and snow balls. The students had a choice if they wanted to use a paint brush to paint snowflakes or use a sponge to make snow balls. They were to make a picture just as if they were looking out the window of our classroom and seeing the snow falling from the sky. To make the lesson even better, was that it was snowing A LOT that afternoon and the visual was easy to picture!

CAFE Lesson "Author's Purpose"

Last week we worked on a new CAFE strategy "Author's Purpose". This strategy focuses on the reasons why an author writes his book. We discussed three main reasons for writing a book. Those reasons spell the word PIE.

P-persuasion

I-information

E-entertainment

To help the students grasp this concept we read several books and after each book we discussed what the author's purpose for writing that book was. In our grade level, most of the books we read are strictly for entertainment "fun" only. We have read a few books that seem to overlap in reasons why the author wrote them. The two that seem to work together the most are information and entertainment. There are several books where the author is teaching us something important, but is using humor to do so. We will continue focusing on this strategy this week, as well as refer back to it throughout the rest of the year.

Below are a few books we either read last week or revisited from reading earlier in the year to discuss the author's purpose.